The other day, a running friend forwarded me a survey from some company or other looking to bring a fitness facility to my area. I ended up abandoning the survey in frustration with the unanswerable but required questions about how much I’d pay for various features, but it got me thinking. I have two gym memberships..one gym is near my office and one near my home. Because convenience is everything. They both have the usual panoply of cardio and strength training equipment..the normal stuff; nothing special. One gym has a nice pool and whirlpool, and the other has an indoor track. Yes, it’s annoyingly curvy at 12 laps per mile, and though I sort of hate running in circles, it’s a huge advantage during unrunnable winter conditions. Both gyms, inexplicably, have small wet and not-very-pleasant locker-rooms, which discourages hanging around after a workout, and both have barely enough space to spread out a mat in the fitness room, but basically they work fine for my needs. But, I was thinking about how they could be better. Here’s the very short list I came up with.
- group exercise for runners. One of my gyms has 3 or 4 different yoga classes, and a bunch of group exercise classes which, as far as I can tell, mostly involve hopping around to music with someone yelling out what to do next. They seem to combine some body-weight resistance with some non-resistance stuff. But, as a distance runner, the last thing I want to do is to spend my non-running days doing high rep, low resistance exercises that might fatigue me a bit but won’t really improve my strength or cardiovascular fitness. Instead, I need to target specific muscles to build strength where it’s needed. The thing is that every runner I know has some sort of exercise routine, whether assigned by a doctor or PT, or self-assigned, either preventively or for a specific running injury. And those who don’t could probably benefit from some strength training and maybe even a bit of stretching, since we are notoriously lacking in range of motion. But the trouble is, exercising is boring, and it isn’t social. Running is fun. You get outside, you see stuff, and you talk to your running mates. Then you go home and drag out the mat and the thera-bands and do your boring exercises alone in your living room. It would be so much better to go to the gym twice a week and do exercises for runners with other runners. So that’s number one on my wish list.
- Number two is running gait analysis. I don’t mean the gait analysis you get at the running store where the goal is to get you into a pair of shoes, but something more detailed and more useful. I’ve never seen this in a fitness club or gym. I’m guessing it wouldn’t be cost-effective for a fitness center to buy the equipment and train the staff but I wonder if it’s something they could arrange for somone to come in and do once a month or so.
I think that’s it. I don’t think I need an alter-G, or V02 max analysis or a personal trainer or a coach, though maybe I would try a coach/trainer if they could really relate to my personal goals and help me achieve them. Maybe a good sports massage person, too. So next time I’m at the gym I guess I’ll put my suggestions in the suggestion box and see what happens.
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